You are here

Drylands FRN III

Project Details

Summary

Project Title:

Work with farmers to improve the ecosystem services in degraded dryland areas of West Pokot, Kenya

Overview:

The semi-arid regions of Sub-Saharan Africa in general, and West Pokot, Kenya in particular, exhibit problems of land degradation, high levels of poverty, and low levels of development. In West Pokot, the target community’s landscape is scarred by many deep gullies, which pose a danger to both livestock and people and stifle social interactions, as near neighbors are often completely cut off from one another. Pokot farmers are former pastoralists, transitioning to agro-pastoralism. However, their traditionally maize-based system is ill-suited to their current environment, given increasingly unfavorable rainfall patterns and worsening soil conditions. With limited soil and water conservation, ongoing erosion continues to be the greatest challenge contributing to declining farm production. Thus, the inception phase of the Farmer Research Network (FRN) Drylands project identified improvement of ecosystem services as the entry point towards addressing the twin problems of land degradation and agricultural productivity.

The project’s inception phase focused on understanding the local context and building social capital and awareness of landscape restoration options in the community. Now, the implementation phase aims to work with farmers and groups to improve ecosystem functioning at both farm and landscape levels. Working with farmers to research suitable options for diversifying crop production with more climate-resilient crops, the project will emphasize simultaneous improvement of soil fertility and productivity along with profitable water use. Much attention will be paid to empowering the community to gain skills and agency for implementing sustainable soil-water conservation strategies, including simple physical control measures and integration of legume-cereal-livestock-agroforestry strategies. These activities align with CCRP principles of agroecological intensification (AEI), collaboration, and systems thinking.

Improvement in farmers’ capacity for soil and water conservation methods and implementation ofsuch knowledge and skills in their community

Diversified crops and livestock forage in the West Pokot and diversified household diets

Diversified crop and livestock products by introduction of processing technologies for value addition

Access to market information for input and output markets

Strengthening of community and stakeholder collaborations working towards rehabilitation of the degraded land

Approach:

Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, dryland regions are experiencing widespread environmental degradation and increased frequency of famine and armed conflict due to diminishing resources, especially of pasture and water. Such areas are also a major source of refugees. Though problems of this magnitude may seem vast and insurmountable, the overall goals and approaches of the Drylands FRN project are extremely aligned with CCRP’s principles and program goals, particularly those related to collaboration, research for AEI impact, values coherence, and farmer-researcher co-creation via the development of a farmer research network. The project team members come from areas like Pokot, where they see both the social and physical environment unraveling, and they have strong motivation and education to address the issue. The project proposes to do this through work at two different spatial and temporal scales.

At the farm level, the project aims to facilitate a farmers’ crop research network to test and adapt options for meeting area households’ food and nutritional security and income needs. Area farmers will assess the adaptability and acceptability of new, more resilient crops (sorghum, finger millet, and drought-tolerant multipurpose legumes), comparing these crop varieties and cropping patterns with their current maize-based system. The new crops are being sourced from their sister Kenya-based CCRP projects, with whom the team has close linkages. Over the longer term, at the landscape level, and in collaboration with other actors—including local schools—the project aims to support the community with technical training and collaborative links with other actors to begin to restore ecosystem services to the severely degraded landscape. During the inception phase, the team convinced the community that it is possible to reverse the degradation process if they work together. Initially, they shared videos about other dryland communities that had organized successful rehabilitation efforts. Then, they accompanied five community-chosen representatives to visit successful community efforts in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Here, with the help of another CCRP project, they learned how different communities had achieved restoration of ecosystem services over a 20-year period, even in more severely degraded landscapes than those of Pokot. A combination of physical soil and water conservation structures and the use of strategically deployed grasses, N-fixing indigenous trees, and fruit trees had helped enable this achievement. Since the trip, the West Pokot community has already formed and reached consensus on their own specific rehabilitation action plans.